Freewheelin' Motl

Мы едем в Америку [My yédem v Amériku]/We Are Going to America/ אין פארן מיר אמצריקצ [Mir forn in Amerike] 1992 Russia Lenfilm/UniRem (81 minutes) directed by Yefim Gribov, co-written by Gribov and Arkadii Krasilshchikov, cinematography by Pavel Barskii and Denis Shchiglovskii; music by Mikhail Gluz; Tamara Lipartiya, editor.

This remarkable film tells the tale of a provincial Russian Jewish family’s journey ‘to America’ in the second decade of the 20th century through the eyes of an alert and sensitive adolescent boy.

Motl (Dima Davydov), who talks to birds, sees ghosts, and rides trains, brings to mind a young Bob Dylan. It is easy to imagine Motl’s stories as the kind of tableau vivant Dylan might concoct about himself or a forbear.

Inspired by Sholom Aleichem’s fiction and Marc Chagall’s paintings, the movie gives an unsentimental and even corrective view to the cheerful, cherry-cheeked cherubic images in such portrayals as Fiddler on the Roof (1971) based on the same artists’ work. The people portrayed in this film are sympathetic but rough and unsophisticated, highly religious and superstitious rural bumpkins.

The film’s rich sepia tones alternate with muted colors which lend to a sense of one’s clearing the cobwebs of memory. Its kaleidoscopic effects make it feel like the recalling or retelling in an old man’s memory of events in his faraway childhood, or his tales remembered and later retold by a younger relative. The stories are rich in impression, sensation and sharp images, with telling details that make them authentic.

Dima Davydov as Motl in Yefim Gribov's We Are Going to America.

In fact, the most fanciful parts often feel as though to be the truest. They would speak for what a narrator remembers it felt like to experience these things, rather an attempt to make a documentary record. Characters float and fade in and out like vapor; many of the factual details are long gone because they were unimportant to the teller in the first place, even had they been known. Images coined moments that stayed with the teller forever, and captivate the viewer.

Motl, his widowed Mama (Lyubov Rumyantseva), Motl’s much older brother Elya (Semyon Strugachev) and Elya’s wife Brokha (Danuta Slavgorodskaya) sell their home and leave their native Kazeltse to travel by train to an unnamed ‘border town.’ They take with them Pinya (Vadim Danilyevskii), a devout young neighbor. In the border town they expect an ‘emigrant committee’ to clear them for passage to America.

Motl and his family are shadowed by Korotyshka (Ivan Bashev), a malevolent Gentile dwarf with close-cropped hair, a long overcoat and a high-pitched voice, ever in the background when unsavory things invade their world. Korotyshka appears to embody a pervasive Old World evil, particularly the anti-Semitism that preys on them wherever they go.

On the train to the border town the family encounters others headed for America. Motl meets Masha (Olya Maksimova), a Gentile girl his age also travelling with her parents to America. Reb Leizer (Rafail Mishylovich), a rabbi from Tul’chin (a Ukrainian town south of Vinnitsa where the film actually was shot), introduces the family to Taibl (Baiba Kranats) and her brother Meyer (Mikhail Maizel), orphans whose ‘father was killed in a pogrom, and mother died of grief.’ Reb Leizer wants to broker a marriage between Taibl and Pinya, purportedly to insure their success in the New World.

The family is robbed when the train arrives at its destination (Korotyshka hobbles away into the station). After waiting in a long line, they make a rambling, emotional appeal for help to an official (Yurii Reshetnikov). They each suppose and prayerfully repeat throughout the film that a ‘better life’ awaits them in America. Could life be worse than in the backward, pogrom-plagued shtetl? But no one is clear as to exactly what this new life will be.

The official is too patient with these people to be a Russian Gentile. He is presumably a Russia-based representative of the Jewish Colonization Association, an international organization founded in the late nineteenth century by wealthy British and French Jews to facilitate Jewish emigration from Russia. He sends them to a doctor for eye examinations—another long line—on the theory that it is best to know in advance whether anyone has a medical condition that would cause U.S. Immigrations authorities to deny entry and deport them back to Europe.

Meanwhile, Motl meets Kopl (Volodya Belinskii), an older Jewish boy travelling on his own, who teases the adolescent about women. Motl and Kopl tumble into Feigele (Tatyana Bubelnikova), a flaky, sexy young woman ‘mystic’ from Kopl’s shtetl who Kopl says knows about devils, spirits and witches.

Feigele, whose name is from the Yiddish for ‘bird,’ entices Motl to lick sugar from her hand the way Motl feeds his occasional bird companion.

There is a traditional wedding. One of the party fails the eye exam (trachoma, a highly contagious infectious eye disease difficult to cure, was a cause for denying entry to the United States). This means that all either will stay in Russia—or devise an alternative route to cross the border to get to the Promised Land.

The haunting cantor improvisations that comprise much of the soundtrack are sung by Boris Finkelshtein, chief cantor of the Grand Choral Synagogue of St. Petersburg. The English subtitles of the spoken Russian are good; however there are no subtitles for the occasional Yiddish and liturgical Hebrew.

The only blemish noted in this otherwise meticulous work was Kopl’s parting anachronism that he would meet Motl ‘in tails and a top hat, swinging a walking stick,’ in Brighton Beach. It would take about twenty more years before this Brooklyn neighborhood would begin to become a destination for Jewish immigrants.